You want to know about Dana Hunter, then, do you? I'm a science blogger, SF writer, compleat geology addict, Gnu Atheist, and owner of a - excuse me, owned by a homicidal felid. I'm the author of Really Terrible Bible Stories vol. I: Genesis. I loves me some Doctor Who and Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers. Sums me up. I'm a Midwest-born Southwesterner transplanted to the Pacific Northwest, which should explain some personality quirks, the tendency to sprinkle Spanish around, and why I'll subject you to some real jawbreakers in the place names department. I'm delighted to be your cantinera! Join me for una tequila. And feel free to follow @dhunterauthor on Twitter. Salud!

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EVENTS

Just so you know, I do love the new roomies, and the house is awesome, and most of the people I’ve met have been quite interesting. There are even many science-oriented ones! But there is also so much woo, I am not even kidding. I mean, we’re living atop a shaman, what could you expect?

You know, I really wish more people cheered for the medicine, and fewer acted like it was a personal failure and a potential death sentence to take psychiatric meds. Because I’d still have a mother if she’d listened to her first and best psychiatrists, rather than the assholes who told her she could and should do without the drugs.

As it stands, I have a shell of what used to be my mom, living in residential care and never able to leave it. There’s nothing left of the person I adored. Just an echo. Her mind would still be intact if she’d stayed on her drugs. She didn’t, and now she’s gone.

So fuck you, assholes who burble about how the drugs are harming us. Fuck you, people who shake their heads and cluck their tongues and judge. I will be flipping you off with one hand while happily taking my medication with the other. I don’t want to end up like her.

I know our current drugs aren’t a perfect solution, and that they sometimes lose their effectiveness as our bodies change, and we need to adjust them. I know they won’t always keep the depression and anxiety away. But they mitigate it. I’ve reached the stage where I’ll have to be on them for the rest of my life if I want to live with my mind mostly intact, and I’m good with that. I’ve watched them help other people I love, watched them return people to life who had nearly left it, and I love them for that. I’m glad we have something. Because I know what unmedicated serious mental illness looks like, and it’s horrific.

So fuck you, with your “I stopped taking meds and now I feel so much better!” My mother fell for your schtick, and she felt great – right up until the last of her lithium and antipsychotics cleared her system, and the suicidal depression and nasty voices came back, until paranoia paralyzed her and made her terrified of everyone and everything. My mother kept falling for your bullshit, and each time, a bit more of her slipped away until she couldn’t come back. You might have a mild enough case of whatever it is you were taking pills for that you just needed the temporary boost and can now do without. Or you may be in that honeymoon period before your mind collapses in on itself again. I don’t care, to be honest. I just want you to fuck off, and leave those of us who have decided we don’t want to risk going on a one-way trip down the wrong road the hell alone.

Don’t start that bullshit with me unless you have overwhelming scientific evidence of a better way to treat mental illness. You don’t have it now. And if you try to wave some fuckwad’s pop psychology book of bullshit in my face as proof, I may do something very Not Nice.

Then again, I might be able to contain myself. As long as I’m on my medication, it’s easier to keep my temper around sanctimonious assholes like you.

I have friends who drive me mad with alt med crapola. People who shun vaccines, people who chug mega-doses of Emergen-C (and catch colds regularly anyway – but still swear it worked!), who go on and on about natural this and herbal that, until I wish to scream. There aren’t enough links to enough studies to explain why I get heartily sick of this bullshit.

Fortunately, I can now direct them to download this quite-reasonably priced ($1.99 for Kindle, last I checked – yowza!) book by a man who 1. knows his shit, 2. thoroughly mucks out the bullshit, and 3. is just kind enough to the placebo effect of some alt med treatments to placate these people.

Those of you who’ve been in the trenches of the vaccine wars probably know Paul as one of the despised enemies of anti-vaxxers. This book is an excellent example of why they hate him: it’s clear, concise, and full of citations to studies that make it very, very difficult to counter him. Also, he’s fair almost to a fault. Alt-med? He’s tried it himself. He’s given things like glucosamine a spin. He’s had less-than-satisfactory experiences with conventional medicine, so he gets why you might like something different. Sure. But then he says, let’s look at the studies – and there we have bad news. No better than placebo. Oh, dear. Better stick with the stodgy stuff, then, unless your condition is amenable to treatment by placebo, in which case, alt-med yourself out (on the safe stuff, anyway).

That’s the book in a nutshell.

Within these pages, many darlings of the alt-med scene are given a harsh dose of reality. Fans of Dr. Mehmet Oz, Depak Chopra, Dr. Andrew Weil, Suzanne Somers, Stanislaw Burzynsky, Jenny McCarthy, Joe Mercola, and other such purveyors of woo will become distressed as their darlings are demolished. People who pop vitamins are in for some very severe shocks. Supplement sectarians are about to get a rude awakening. Most of the book is merciless, and rightly so.

Most of these fatal blows are delivered with calm precision and gentle reliance on the facts, but the message is driven home with the occasional zinger, like this (my favorite line in the book): “Unfortunately, Vitamin O [oxygen] users lacked the one thing necessary to extract oxygen from water: gills.” Beauty.

I felt he went a little – perhaps a lot – too easy on the purveyors of placebos at the end (a trait he shares, interestingly enough, with Mark Twain, who had a big softy for Christian Science for just that reason: the placebo effect). I’m afraid those prone to such things will seize upon this and shriek that their pet nostrum really and truly works. I would guide their attention to the paragraphs in the final section that throw a bucket of cold water over the love fest. These are the four ways Paul divides practitioners of placebo medicine from outright quacks. For those who are curious, or need the crash course as an immediate inoculation against woo for self or others, they are these:

“First, by recommending against conventional therapies that are helpful.” If it quacks that you don’t need that chemo, it’s a quack. Run.

Second, “by promoting potentially harmful therapies without adequate warning.” If it quacks that its horrid green goo is 1000% safe despite being full of arsenic, it’s a quack. Run.

Third, “by draining patients’ bank accounts.” If it quacks it can heal you, but needs extravagant amounts of money to do so, it’s a quack. Run.

Fourth, “by promoting magical thinking.” You know the drill by now.

After reading this book, I feel much better prepared for the next dissertation on the wonders of alt-med I’m subjected to. And I have a handy tome to hand them that may, just possibly, save their lives. At the very least, it should make them wiser about their medical choices, save them some coin, and promote some harmony between them and the skeptics in their lives. Not bad for one little book, eh?

Please Share the Verdad!

A Bear submitted a bit o’ a puzzle. Good thing, too, as I am deep in frantic research and prep for a trip to Mount St. Helens this weekend, so I haven’t time for anything gorgeously detailed. Especially not since WordPress ate my gorgeously-detailed prior post. Grr.

I’ll just quote from his emails:

Artifact or artefact? This rock came from the beach nearby, is it a product of natural forces or culture? This rock originated from the Karmutzen formation on Vancouver Island and has been entrained in glacial drift as well as marine beach activity by my guess.

Given the odd shape has it been culturally altered?

It would be interesting to see what your readers can make of this.

There is a midden nearby that is eroding onto the beach where I have found some nice artifacts, so it would not be out of place.

If there is interest in its composition, it is dense, specific gravity of almost 2.5, fairly hard and the black crystals appear to be magnetite as the rock has a fairly strong attraction to my neo-magnet.

So there’s some lovely detail, and we have photos, complete with scale:

Rock or artifact I

Rock or artifact II

Rock or artifact III

If this had been found in Arizona, I’d be tempted to call it a mano, which is the bit Native Americans there rubbed against metates to grind corn. I don’t know if our local tribes used anything like that. And I have no idea how to tell the difference between a wave-smoothed rock shaped like a lozenge and a human-smoothed rock shaped like a lozenge.

What say you all?

Also, consider this practice. Trebuchet sent me a riddle I’ll be springing on you soon, and it is brutal. This is your opportunity to sharpen your brains in anticipation. Use it wisely.

Please Share the Verdad!

Well, brain dead, anyway, because how else are they going to transfer money from your wallet to theirs?

Take water. Just yer basic water. Now, I’ve fallen for the SoBe Lifewater scheme, not because of its supposed health benefits but because they add things to it that make it very tasty, and so I can drink something like Strawberry Dragonfruit and pretend I’m not really drinking water whilst still getting hydration. And did I mention it’s so tasty? There’s an adorable lizard, too. So there we have added value I can taste and see. But for other water needs, tap water run through a Brita filter works just fine. It is healthy and cheap, a winning combo.

However. It seems no item we put in our mouths is free from quacks. I need to get Chaos Lee back here to tell you about that time he worked for a call center that took orders for infomercial products. One company that contracted with them were selling “ionized water,” claiming all sorts of incredible health benefits. During the meeting in which the company was extolling said benefits in order to make order-takers all excited about it, Chaos asked them unnerving questions based on basic chemistry, which ended in them claiming it was ionized because it had an extra neutron. “That’s not ionized water,” Chaos said. “That’s heavy water.” Upon which the sales rep became upset, perhaps because health nuts might be hinky about buying something used to cool nuclear reactors.

But these days, “ionized” may sound a little too chemical, and we live in a society so obsessed with going chemical-free that some people market, with a straight face, a “chemical-free chemistry set.” Deborah Blum had Things to say about that. And this. After that last episode, I really hope she doesn’t hear about this newest craze, because she might do herself an injury. Still, the resulting blog post would be entertaining.

Perched on a white tablecloth we noticed some very sleek water bottles, labeled Illanllyr SOURCE. A serious guy named Eric Ewell eagerly offered us a taste, “Try this pristine organic water.” We choked back a giggle. Organic? Really?

As the company’s website says, “Illanllyr … comes from our sources beneath certified organic fields in west Wales in the UK.” So, Ewell says, the water has never been tainted with chemicals, making it organic as it as it emerges from the ground.

Now, when I hear the word “organic” combined with “water,” I’m thinking of organic matter like cow shit floating around in it. Especially since it’s beneath “certified organic” fields. Already not really getting the super-healthy vibe. And while the website touts the water’s location beneath a farm that’s never been farmed any other way than “organic,” thus supposedly ensuring the water is “organic” by proxy, those of us who know our geology are wondering about the details of the aquifer it comes from. Water has this distressing tendency to travel, and who knows what non-organic ickyness it’s toured through? I mean, really. Never? Never ever tainted with a single chemical? Not in the whole history of the earth? The gentleman has as much to learn about the water cycle as he does chemistry.

I notice Mr. Ewell or his staff have very carefully not put those “not tainted with chemicals” claims on their website. Someone seems to have realized that their water does, in fact, contain chemicals. They call them “minerals,” so as not to scare the anti-chemical crowd away, but it’s loaded with ’em:

As for his “never been tainted with chemicals” claim made in person, I hate to break it to him: minerals are chemicals. So, in fact, is H2O. That’s two hydrogens and an oxygen, bonding into a water molecule, which is (cue scary music) a chemical!!!eleventyzomgwe’reallgonnadiiiiieeeee!!!!!!!

But let’s get back to this “organic” claim. Those of us who aren’t instinctive chemists have skimmed that word, thinking of it in the colloquial sense of “what you tell people something is so they’ll pay twice as much for it, believing it’s all-natural and much better for you than that non-organic shit.” But of course, chemists are already prone on the floor, pounding their fists in the carpet and laughing helplessly, and Ed Yong is horrified:

So, my darlings, remember: no water on earth is organic, and if you ever have the pleasure of someone trying to sell you “organic” water in person, you are now free to ask them why they think one of the main ingredients in embalming fluid is so much healthier than plain ol’ dihydrogen oxide.

Gorgeous.

Please Share the Verdad!

I’m constantly amazed by the crazy shit people will believe. Comes to that, I’m constantly amazed by the crazy shit I used to believe. There was a time, for instance, where I believed that there might be something to Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). That, of course, was before I began reading about it.

Some of the people I know IRL, otherwise sane and sober people, fall prey to this crazy crap. They drop way too much money on woo. And they believe in all sorts of nonsense, like vaccines causing autism (they don’t).

They’re not stupid. It’s just that there’s so damned much misinformation out there, and the snake-oil salespeople have silver tongues. So I think it’s time to put up, in one post which I can then point them to, a nice set of resources that might keep them from falling prey. Especially now that homeopathic “remedies” are finding their way onto supermarket shelves, right alongside legitimate medicines, as if they belong there (they don’t).

Those of us who already like our medicine science-based could still use these sites. They’re always good for a belly-laugh. Sometimes for a primal scream.

Respectful Insolence: Orac’s delicious blog, in which all manner of cranks, woo-meisters, and ridiculous nonsense gets smacked down at length and without mercy. His main focus is anti-vaccine nonsense, but he’ll battle any woo that strikes his fancy, and he’s especially useful for combating cancer woo, seeing as how he’s a surgeon and breast cancer researcher.

Science-Based Medicine: A blog on a wide range of woo-tastic topics by a stellar stable of medical bloggers. It’s not as insolent as Respectful Insolence, but it’s solid stuff and sometimes hysterically funny. There’s nothing quite like a science-based physician expressing their frustration at the more obstinate sorts of woo. It’s also a good place to learn how science-based medicine works, how it could be improved, and why it’s different from evidence-based medicine.

Quackwatch: This should be your first stop in your quest to avoid all things quack. It’s a tremendous resource. No false balance, just facts. Relentless, uncompromising facts. Woo does not stand a chance here.

What’s the Harm? The definitive answer to that question is contained in these pages. Woo’s last defense is claiming that, even if it can’t cure absolutely everything just like it claims, it at least does no harm. Wrongo. You’d be amazed at the harm even the most harmless-seeming woo can do.

Please Share the Verdad!

For a brief and all-too-memorable two years of my life, we lived in Sedona, Arizona. It’s a beautiful place, red rock country that will dye your white socks a nice shade of rust whilst hiking. It’s also a total magnet for oddballs.

When we first moved there, back in the late 80s, an alarming number of the populace was convinced a space ship was going to emerge from Bell Rock, which to those who don’t think it’s shaped like a bell believe it’s shaped like a UFO. This, of course, meant there was a UFO in it, and if you had the right crystal, you could summon the space ship that was to emerge on an auspicious day, and the aliens who had (for reasons I never learned) parked their ship under that mass of old sandstone would pick you up and give you a lift to some sort of very spiritual destination somewhere out in the universe.

Vendors set up roadside markets where quartz crystals lay on tables, sparkling in the sun. I found myself browsing at one on a fine day, because I love crystals and was hoping to find a bargain. Alas, all I found were overpriced rocks and one woman waving a fistful, exclaiming to her friend, “This one was cold, and this one was kind of warm, but this one’s hot!” The fact that relative warmth may have been due to the fact there was a sun shade over part of the table didn’t seem to occur to her. No, she was after something that would vibrate at just the right frequency for thumbing a ride with extraterrestrials.

I gave it up as a bad job and left. Perhaps that day in my tweens was a harbinger of my future skepticism. Or maybe I’d just been exposed to too much New Age schlock.

The Great Day came, but the spaceship didn’t, and all those who had paid far too much for some decent quartz, sold their earthly belongings, and camped out in the desert waiting for Bell Rock to open would have had to slink despondently home if they hadn’t sold said home.

But even that rather spectacular fail didn’t shake their faith. They still babbled on about wise aliens from other worlds and crystal magic and vortexes like the one by the Post Office that caused all the horrible car crashes. No, cars didn’t crash because it was a badly designed, extremely busy t-shaped intersection with the worst visibility in town. No, silly skeptics! It’s obviously the malign influence of a bad vortex, not at all like the good vortexes out in the hills, where one could – well, do whatever it is New Agey folk do when communing with good vortexes.

Psychics and so forth continued selling their New Age kitsch downtown. I should have got round to telling them to aim a sun lamp at the trays of crystals so they could sell more “hot” ones.

Years later, after I’d moved away, a pagan friend came to visit from parts east. His friends had told him he had to see Sedona. “It’s so spiritual,” said they. They babbled on and on about its mystical powers and so forth, and sent him out on a mission: he just had to go, and report back.

He’s skeptical enough he took my warnings to heart, and tried to steel himself against disappointment, but his jaw still dropped when he saw what the spiritual mecca really was: no more than commercial kitsch slathered thick along the main drag, a tourist trap laid for the sensitive soul. Nothing I’d said could quite capture the shock of the reality. It’s really that bad.

On December 21, 2012 Mr. Peter Gersten plans to hurl himself off of Bell Rock in Sedona, AZ. It is his belief that a cosmic portal will open at this time and in this place, and that he will be delivered into a new, unfathomable opportunity. He is fully willing to die if he is wrong about the portal.

Ah, yes, I can say with some certainty that “he will be delivered into a new, unfathomable opportunity.” It’s not every day the local coyote population has a smorgasbord plop down from the top of Bell Rock.

Let’s just hope all of the negative vibes from all the skeptical people laughing at him cause him to change his mind. I mean, you know what negativity does to portals. I mean, look what happened when a few locals poked fun at the idea a spaceship would emerge – no spaceship. You can’t tell me that’s a coinkydink.

We’ve already broken your portal, Mr. Gersten. I’m sorry. It won’t open due to all those bad vibrations. You might as well stay home.

Please Share the Verdad!

Kimball Atwood’s been kicking the arses of all those who like to babble that because alt med’s popular, even the most implausible, most wootastic woo should be studied. We’re talking folks who think that homeopathy should be studied, despite the fact the basic science isn’t behind it at all – you’d have to overturn pretty much all of physics and chemistry for it to qualify as anything remotely possible to actually work as more than a placebo mixed with willful idiocy. The people who back randomized, double-blind, clinical trial after clinical trial for the wooiest of woo despite assloads of evidence already available showing it doesn’t, can’t, and will never work are the same ones who would probably demand said trials for butt reflexology if enough dumbfucks fall for a hoax.

But I digress. I was about to tell you about the fact that I, too, practice complimentary and alternative medicine (CAM). I found this out while reading Kimball’s lovely smackdown. Here’s the passage that revealed all to me:

In addition to the ethical fallacy just discussed, there is another fallacy having to do with popularity: the methods in question aren’t very popular. In the medical literature, the typical article about an implausible health claim begins with the irrelevant and erroneous assertion that “34%” or “40%” or even “62%” (if you count prayer!) of Americans use ‘CAM’ each year. This is irrelevant because at issue is the claim in question, not ‘CAM’ in general. It is erroneous because ‘CAM’ in general is so vaguely defined that its imputed popularity has been inflated to the point of absurdity, as exemplified by the NCCAM’s attempt, in 2002, to include prayer (which it quietly dropped from the subsequent, 2007 survey results).

By these standards, I so totally do practice CAM! Yep, it’s that slippery of a definition. Y’see, sometimes, when I feel like I might be coming down with a cold, but it might just be allergies or too much smoking instead, I run this little litany through my head: “I hope I’m not getting sick! I hope I’m not getting sick! I hope I’m not getting sick!” And sometimes, when I wish really hard I won’t get sick, sometimes I don’t get sick!!!

It’s the best takedown of the products in the SkyMall catalog I’ve ever read in my life, and that’s not just because I haven’t read many. Even if I read thousands after this, it shall always be among the top 5. It’s full of tasty bits, but here are the two I forced upon my coworker because they were just too good not to share.

After the segue into a truly hideous Lancet paper babbling about tattoos on ancient mummies and their correlation to acupuncture points, Dr. Crislip says,

“I think they all have it wrong. Look carefully at the location of the tattoo points. There mark the intersections of the webbing on Spiderman’s costume. These are not acupuncture points, but rather reflect the ability of both Ötzi and the Peruvian mummy to see into the future imaginings of Stan Lee. I think it makes as much sense based on the data.”

My darlings, no comic book geek and connoisseur of fine woo can read that and not die laughing.

And while I usually avoid quoting a writer’s closing remarks, preferring to leave those delights for the reader to discover, I cannot as a Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fan refrain from quoting his close in full:

I was originally going to discuss the Head Spa Massager, the X5 HairLaser and others, but the Aculife took me down many unexpected pathways and I am the slowest writer at SBM. They did have numerous cool gadgets and products on SkyMall. Me? I really want Voldemort’s wand and the One ring. Both work using the same mechanism as acupuncture and mummy medical tattoo’s. I have ordered them and soon I will be invincible.